Tag Archives: andersmodig

Typography

Lest We Forget

What is a memory? Can you remember things that haven’t happened to you? And how on earth are you going to remember what you are reading in this blogpost?

In October 2018, RMIT University of Melbourne introduced Sans Forgetica, a new typeface, which is said to increase your memory of what you just read.

This is far from another déjà vu with Helvetica, has nothing to do with that cheesy 80s hit sung by Barbra Streisand, and I doubt that it will improve my ability to memorise the name of the person I just introduced myself to.

It has been proven to improve memory retention when tested by 400 students.

We live in an era where communication tends to be straightforwardly presented, smoothly designed, and easy on the eye.

The findings of RMIT however show the advantages of having to put a bit of effort into something.

When you are slightly challenged, you enter the ultimate state for the brain and body to learn and remember.

So, what are the main ingredients of this revolutionary font – available as a free download – developed by the School of Design together with the Business Lab, both faculties of Victoria’s proudest university?

The first and foremost ingredient is to combine psychology and design principles in order to challenge the norm of understanding typography.

 

Enter the gaps. The gaps are not about saving taxpayers’ money on using less ink, but about hitting the sweet spot of breaking design principles without becoming too illegible.

The second key element of Sans Forgetica is the backslant, normally only used graphically for very specific mathematical expressions.

Together these ingredients create what the inventors refer to as desirable difficulty, which, by the way, sounds like something that belongs in the cruel jokes of package design than typography.

Has anyone ever understood how to properly open half of the food packaging in a civilised way without eventually resorting to butchering the carton with your sharpest knife? I am sorry, I digress.

The ‘desirable difficulty’ you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing.

This is also a very clear example of how we comprehend fonts – not letter by letter, but by outline. Which also explains how you can read jsut abuot antyhnig as lnog as the frist and lsat lteters are crorect.

Sans Forgetica is a true cross-pollination of different research fields.

The leading trio behind the project are practising typographers and typography teachers.

Mr. Stephen Banham, Dr Jo Peryman, and Dr Janneke Blijlevens from the RMIT Behavioural Business Lab are working on a scientific report, which will show exactly how efficient Sans Forgetica is.

In the meantime I am thinking that maybe my lousy name memory could be improved if nametags at the next event could please be printed in Sans Forgetica?

And last but not least – since physical movement and multisensory experiences also have been proven to reinforce memory, I have an idea for the next timeyou really want to memorise a text.

Walk barefoot on sand, blast that cheesy 80s hit on your sound system, burn your favourite incense, and, of course, read it in Sans Forgetica.

Lest we forget.

 

 

 

– Anders Modig

Anders Modig, based in Basel since 2013, has been a journalist for 15 years. He writes about watches and design for titles like Vanity Fair on Time, Hodinkee, Café and South China Morning Post.

He has been editor in chief of seven magazines and books, including the current annual design magazine True Design by Rado, and his company also organises events for clients like TAG Heuer, Zenith and Patek Philippe.

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Piece of cake

The white chocolate marzipan cake balances precariously; defies equilibrium. Her mouth is seemingly on repeat – he cannot hear her any more.

It doesn’t matter; he’s heard it all before. Maybe it was another ailment, maybe it was another doctor, maybe it was somebody else that had done her wrong.

He cannot hear her; he can only see the fine network of wrinkles that have conquered the area from her smile pits to her temples. It has grown since the last time, hasn’t it? Deep engravings criss-crossing a skin grown thick, a skin grown … soft?

He would like to grab her chin to feel what life has made to her face.

Despite the fine canyons, despite the matt lustre her skin also looks soft like a baby’s, as if it had gone full circle, starting all over again.

But such is life. He cannot feel her cheek like she once did his while marvelling over the miracle of life. Because surely she did, didn’t she?

Not that he can ever remember her being physical. And wasn’t it he who reintroduced hugs in the family in his teenage years once he’d learnt to appreciate them again?

He always liked to be physically close.

Absence has caused sorrow, but nevertheless hugs between friends for a short moment in time felt silly. Not for real. Shallow. Not so any more.

The wrinkles pulsate in rhythmical sync with her unstoppable verbiage and deep breathing.

Sun-scorched earth. Tree trunk broken off by a storm. Labyrinth corridors of an uprooted ants nest. Sound waves through a freshly crackled brûlée.

Finally the stoic piece of cake gives in to gravity’s relentless quest and falls over.

In Sweden a symbol of love gone awry. Standing cake – you will get married. Fallen cake, welcome to Tinder

The cake falls just like he has fallen. And stood up. Fallen and stood up. Fallen again and stood up again only to fall over again.

Only one of those times there were witnesses and signatures.

OK, two if you also count the loan agreement for the duplex apartment. Is perhaps a mortgage a bigger sign of love than a marriage certificate?

The white chocolate marzipan clings to the gold-rimmed china like an unseen, sticky spider web caught on your face during a summer stroll through a leafy forest.

The fall from grace is oh so slow – isn’t it always?

The force of gravity is however strong enough to refurbish the inner creams; the office-brown chocolate mousse erupts in over the bleak-yellow vanilla cream like a volcano’s last sigh of molten lava.

She has gone silent. The wrinkles collapse. She takes her spoon to her mouth, chews quickly, and chases the sweet fix down with a sip of coffee gone cold.

The wrinkles gather momentum again, like a sprinter coming out of the blocks, albeit in slow motion. She hesitates. As she often does when she wants to say something that matters. Is it his fault?

Has he been too hard on her over the years?

Or is it simply her own life-long insecurity that she has always had to mask with over-compensation and narcissistic self-affirmation?

Her tongue eventually joins what, from judging from the breath will be less of a moan. Could it – lo and behold – be a conversation looming at the horizon?

He takes his eyes off the fallen cake, meets his mother’s gaze. Curious.

“Would you like another piece of cake?”

“Yes, please.”

 

Anders Modig, based in Basel since 2013, has been a journalist for 15 years. He writes about watches and design for titles like Vanity Fair on Time, Hodinkee, Café and South China Morning Post.

He has been editor in chief of seven magazines and books, including the current annual design magazine True Design by Rado, and his company also organises events for clients like TAG Heuer, Zenith and Patek Philippe.

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HALO Shines Under Art Basel

Art Basel and Design Miami/Basel is over us again … and I love it. The 2018 edition shifts its architecture, gives a Brazilian architect the credit she deserves and questions the fundamentals of our existence while serving inverted fondue.

In 2018, the immediate wow effect of Art Basel Unlimited’s entry is somewhat muted – because the entry itself it is not that immediate anymore.

As of 2018 you have to take two escalators to reach it – but this structural change, due to several of Baselworld’s mega stands remaining erected the whole year, is actually a positive thing.

Now the entry to Design Miami/Basel and the entry to Art Basel Unlimited are next to each other.

Design Miami/Basel, often overlooked by the visitors is a place where you can discover several of the world’s most prestigious galleries for collectable modern and contemporary design – and I would be very surprised if this new entrance would not dramatically increase its visitor numbers.

The Messeplatz level of Design Miami/Basel is home to the curated exhibition Design at Large, where Zhoujie Zhang shows a futuristic take on what a chair could be.

A 60-point sensor chair is hooked up to a computer, which in real time on a screen in front of you creates the design of the ultimate chair; shaped by your own unique human interactions.

At Large-space is also dedicated to furniture by late Lina Bo-Bardi. In the last decade Italian-born, Brazilian Bo Bardi has risen from dusty annals of architecture to become the architecture and design superstar she always deserved to be.

Unfortunately this is happening decades after her death in 1992, but it is great to see that her work finally gets mainstream recognition above and beyond the inner circles of architecture.

 

©Endless Form/ Zhang Zhoujie Digital Lab/ Courtesy of Gallery ALL

Despite the fair having just started I have been back at HALO twice, located in the basement of Hall 4 (next to Swissôtel’s entry). I have probably spent more than four hours in there, and not only because of the lavish vernissage which included an inverted fondue, where orange salmon cubes coated in yellow mango cream was dipped into smoking cold liquid nitrogen.

No, I keep returning because the fourth Audemars Piguet’s Art Comission is a really interesting collaboration by the British art duo Superconductor, CERN, and the white-bearded theoretical physicist rock star John Ellis.

In a lowly lit hall, an eight-metre-diameter circular sound and light installation projects series of golf ball-sized light dots throughout the room.

Meanwhile, hammers hit low-pitched piano strings that vertically line the installation.

Both light and sound – remember that all matter is made of particle and wave – is a reanimation of 60 real collision measurements; universe-deciphering data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel, which circles 27 kilometres of subterranean Geneva.

When the LHC is operating, more than a billion of these subatomic particle collisions occur every second at near speed of light – utterly beyond human perception.

Therefore Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Superconductor have reanimated the raw data by seriously enlarging the light and sound waves from each measured particle collision, resulting in the dotted light patterns and the somewhat doomsday ringing piano strings.

It is also extended in time: at LHC the pattern of each collision lasts 25 nanoseconds, at HALO up to 40 seconds. Said theoretical physicist John Ellis during Wednesday’s panel discussion:

“What we are trying to do at CERN is to understand the most fundamental structures of matter and the universe, where we come from and where we are going. I like to mention the famous painting of Paul Gauguin, the people on the South Sea island asking ‘What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’ That is exactly the questions that we physicists are trying to answer …  by trying to understand what matter the universe is made of. I had a copy of Gauguin’s picture in my office, just to remind me why I came to work every day, and that is still why I come to work every day.”

HALO contains the three levels that is my very personal opinion for what makes great art experiences:

  1. Immediate sensory stimulation or friction, that draws you into the artwork, regardless of your prior knowledge of it.
  2. The more you know about the artist, the history, the context, the more the work grows.
  3.  If the artwork also dares to shamelessly ask the biggest questions – all the better.

And puh-lease! Don’t expect answers. Asking questions is what keeps humanity moving forward, not answers.

 ©Photo courtesy of  Superconductor and Audemars Piguet

So, by all means – when you visit Art Basel 2018 go to Unlimited. It is still … well, unlimited.

Do go to the gallery sections to see the Warhols and the Bacons and the Dubuffets and the contemporary artists. And really make sure you don’t miss HALO. And why not this time around also pay a visit to Miami Design?

 

Anders Modig, based in Basel since 2013, has been a journalist for 15 years. He writes about watches and design for titles like Vanity Fair on Time, Hodinkee, Café and South China Morning Post.

He has been editor in chief of seven magazines and books, including the current annual design magazine True Design by Rado, and his company also organises events for clients like TAG Heuer, Zenith and Patek Philippe.

 

Beitragsbild: ©Lina Bo Bardi Giancarlo Palanti Studio d’Arte Palma 1948–1951Presented by Nilufar Gallery Photo Courtesy of James Harris

 

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How could I not?

“What inspires you, something that is also related to what you do, something time-related?”

Stevie’s question came out of the blue just after we let out a couple of discreet post-lunch bagel burps. It set the wheels spinning in my brain, which has been very occupied, perhaps too occupied, with writing about watches for more than a dozen years.

It took me a while to realise that it is actually the foundation itself that inspires me: time. It is the only thing we have, and agreeing on what time is and should be is the only way it is possible to keep a society together. Initially experimental sundials and water clocks were few and far between, but since the 1300s keeping time has been very social. From the church clocks ringing to get the congregation together to the infamous countdown for New Year’s Eve under the big clock at Times Square, time is absolutely everywhere. From when you are at work to the exact meeting time to the trains to the start of your favourite TV show to the minutes you cook an egg to your liking – time is absolutely everywhere, and nothing in our civilised society would have been possible if it weren’t for the relentless studies of men and women like the Mesopotamians who raised a pole, measuring the movement of the sun, John Harrison cracking the mystery to perfect sea navigation thanks to the accuracy of his clocks, Abraham-Louis Breguet for not only putting timekeepers on the wrist, but also mitigating the adversarial effects of gravity on the movement of pocket watches, and present-day geniuses like Rémi Maillat of Krayon who just made the first mechanical watch that shows you sunrise and sunset wherever you are. They all work with the same foundation: how to mimic and symbolise the celestial movements, because that’s what time and clocks and watches are all about: astronomy. And like the Austrian designer Rainer Mutsch put it:

“Time has no undo button.”

What baffles me is that despite the fact that time is the only thing that we have, the only commodity that is distributed to each and every living creature on this planet, people ask me why I write about watches, thus in an extended perspective asking why I write about time. I hadn’t thought about it in that sense before this article, but for the next time somebody puts this question to me I now have the perfect answer: “How could I not?”

– Anders Modig

 

Anders Modig, based in Basel since 2013, has been a journalist for 15 years. He writes about watches and design for titles like Vanity Fair on Time, Hodinkee, Café and South China Morning Post.

He has been editor in chief of seven magazines and books, including the current annual design magazine True Design by Rado, and his company also organises events for clients like TAG Heuer, Zenith and Patek Philippe.

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